While I was a small child I was bedridden for a long time in our muddy house… in front of me there was a wall covered with white lime… I used to stare at the wall to see pictures for battles, horses, trees and faces; and every day the scene on the wall changes and this was my sole amusement when I was young…
After I started painting for the first time when I was 14 years old I used to stare at the wall from the outside with admiration especially the green moss that exists on the upper side of the wall due to the rain and I always dreamed of painting them.
In the same room as I am sleeping; I wake up at night on the dim room light to see an enchanting woman staring at me without moving in her full ornaments and colorful dresses, and in spite of that charm she scares so I escape to my mother sleeping next to me.
After that I painted the wall hundreds of times with that beautiful gene woman and till now I could not reach that charm and beauty that I saw when I was a small child.

Hammoud Chantout was born on one cold day in January, 1956 in a mud-hut with a dome (in Al-Sfera village east of Aleppo). He was the fourth child for his father Khaled, after a son and two daughters. His father was a traveling upholsterer who after discovering that village, settled in it. He also worked as a wheat miller (it was his forefathers profession - one of them, Faris was a stone cutter for water mills) and designed a hand-mill.
Hammoud's house was just like all houses in the village. The house was later extended due to the increasing family. He recalls those days as being simple, pleasant and full of love and he remembers playing on straw bails during the harvest seasons, in wide open spaces. He recalled this memory after seeing the works of Fateh Muddares and the paintings of Hasko. Similar houses and spaces appeared in his early paintings.
The still growing family later went back to Hama and settled in a room of his grandfather's house which was also shared by his two uncle's families (the house no longer exists). His father continued working in upholstery, fishing on the Orontes River and going to the village occasionally. His mother Masaa (whose family was originally Christian, her father becoming a Moslem after being left by his father-who immigrated to Brazil). She worked in a carpet workshop within the same house.
The boy who got used to the open fields of the village always ran out of that crowded house to play on Orontes bank. That was when he began his tuition, moving between a few elementary schools. However, he didn't like school and often didn't used to go, so his mother suggested that he should quit school to help his father by working, because of their family's hard financial situation (they were 13 people). So he helped him fishing, worked in a carpenter's workshop, then in a mill and at last as a house painter (which he liked a little bit.) Then someone advised his father to send him back to school, so he went back and studied harder than before to improve his marks. In the 7th grade of his primary school was the moment of truth for him, because he discovered his artistic talent while practicing drawing and painting for the first time.